The Racial Face

Racial immutability of Jews and blacks was proved through the unchanging features of the Jewish and negro face over thousands of years. From the time of Johann Kaspar Lavater, the Swiss Protestant poet and pastor from Zurich, it became almost axiomatic that there was something unique about the Jewish and negro face and head. Some argued that there was something goat-like about the Jewish face and something ape-like about the negro face. Jewish and negro eyes were considered special. Robert Knox discussed the racial face with respect to negroes and Jews, finding commonalities. For Frederic William Farrar, too, it was the overlapping categories of blacks and Jews that provided the best proof of the immutability of racial types. The indelibility of African blackness and the indelibility of Jewishness were common themes that linked Jews and negroes from medieval times to the twentieth century. Alfred Russell Wallace made the critical linkage between Jews and blacks that had underlined much racial speculation for the previous five hundred years and that would continue long after his death, particularly with respect to their unchanging, ancient pedigree and appearance. While many scholars opined that the Egyptian monuments offered the best proofs of the immutability of the Jewish and negro face, Alfred Cort Haddon considered that the Assyrian depictions of Jews were the most reliable as far as Jewish faces were concerned. Jewish faces were even to be found in west Africa.

The Black/Jew

Sander Gilman argued that the consensus of nineteenth century ethnography was that the Jews “were ‘black’ or, at least, ‘swarthy.’ ” In fact, there was no such consensus. Monogenist ethnographers had to show that European Jews were white in order to be able to show that black Jews had changed from white as a result of climate determinism. The increased racialization of Jews and blacks around the time of the American Civil War was accompanied by a renewal of the idea that the Jews and blacks had much in common, including color. Robert Knox was one of the first anthropologists to argue that the Jews were negroid. He was followed by many others, most of them polygenists. Other conflations of Jews and blacks included features such as smell, ears, eyes, hair, sexuality, etc. Jews were constructed as negroes, and at the same time blacks were constructed as Jews. They were both considered to be uniquely ugly. The ugliest Africans were the so-called Hottentots, who themselves had been deemed to be of Jewish origin. African tribes throughout the continent were constructed as Jews. The founder of political antisemitism, Wilhelm Marr, came to his hatred of Jews through a hatred of blacks in America. He thought Jews had negroid features and antecedents. From the time of the German Enlightenment Jews were inserted into the category of black slaves. For the influential racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, black blood flowed in the veins of Jews. The same goes for the important theorist Friedrich Ratzel. In the Americas, out-and-out anti-black racists were often equally anti-Jewish.

Rassenwahn

German science in early twentieth century was sophisticated, and Nazi theorists had to pay it lip service as they constructed their racial empire. Definitions of key terms like blood or race were never arrived at. Who or what was a Jew? Hans F. K. Günther and other Nazi race theorists were poorly trained and vague. The same was true of Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most influential race ideologues of the Nazi Party. Their works were taken seriously by Nazi bureaucracy. Throughout the Reich, race theorists helped the bureaucracy. George-Alexis Montandon, the Swiss-born, naturalized French physician and polygenist anthropologist, selected Jews in France for deportation using utterly dubious criteria. Exhibitions on race and centers of study were set up to promote Nazi race policies. Relatively little new physical anthropological research was conducted on Jews because it would have undermined the basis of racial laws. Attempts were made to see if Jewish blood was different. Non-somatic research into Jewish difference was carried out by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. Nazi Jewish studies had to engage with the black Jews who had troubled polygenists.

The Black/Jew in the Racial State

Extreme racist opinion in Germany, exemplified by Theodor Fritsch, asserted that Jews were a negroid mix. This continued in the works of, for instance, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Each individual Jew, according to John Beddoe, the pigmentation expert, contained the negroid and Asiatic type. The Jew was a chameleon in this respect. Rudolf Virchow conducted a research project in which skin color was presented not as an objective fact but rather as something to be intuitively felt. The general consensus, even among Jews, was that Jews were dark, yet the research showed the contrary. Jews in the liberal arts and poetry of the Weimar period often constructed Jews as dark or black, as in the work of George Grosz. The Swiss-French race theorist and anti-Semite George-Alexis Montandon perceived the Jews as an ancient cross of Asiatic and negro and expressed this in his famous exhibition, “How to recognize a Jew.” The fear of cross-breeding became more intense in the Nazi period, along with sexual fear of blacks and Jews. Hitler attacked the “black disgrace” on the Rhine that was leading to a Jewish-inspired Vernegerung and would eventually produce in Germany something like the negrified French state to the south. Nazi polemical and propaganda literature habitually portrayed the Jews as black or dark. Nazis borrowed from American anti-black legislation. Fascist Italy had a similar fear of racial pollution by Jews and blacks, as can be seen in countless cartoons and illustrations in La Difesa della Razza. Cultural pollution by Jews and negroes was equally feared.

“The Most Striking Circumstance”

The nineteenth century witnessed the development of a bitter struggle between monogenists and polygenists. Polygenists increasingly looked for confirmation of racial hierarchies and signs of racial immutability in physiological indicators. Change in color within a race seemed to be an unanswerable proof of the effect of nature on racial characteristics and seemed to offer an explanation of racial difference. The color change of Jews from white to black was the best example of this, and increasingly black Jewish communities became the proof monogenists needed of the unitary origins of humankind. James Cowles Prichard was the leading British monogenist, and he was among the first to perceive that the color spectrum in Jews was the strongest weapon in the monogenist armory.

The Loango Turn

In 1777 it was revealed that there were not only white negroes and other weird and wonderful hybrids in Loango, there were also black Jews with some striking customs. This was revealed in a book by Christian George Andreas Oldendorp. The scientists of the Enlightenment were as fascinated by these black Jews as they had been by the white negroes and other hybrids. Some, such as Theophil Ehrmann, were dubious about Oldendorp’s revelation. But leading Enlightenment figures such as Anton Büsching, Conrad Malte-Brun, Johann David Michaelis, Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann, Kurt Sprengel, and others debated their importance from a racial and historical standpoint. Other black Jews were invoked by Paul Jakob Bruns. The Ethiopian Jews had been introduced to Enlightenment thinkers by James Bruce. Jews, who were anxious to be seen as white, were not much interested in black Jews. An exception was Ludwig Markus, who wrote about Loango Jews and others, including the Falashas of Ethiopia. Black Indian Jews were brought into the conversation and became an important object of Enlightenment speculation about race and color determinism. The idea of a color spectrum for Jews was born.

All Africa and Her Prodigies

Africa was the acknowledged home of the monstrous and the hybrid. The kingdom of Loango was a particular focus of attention with regard to monstrous hybridity. Various creatures such as the pongo symbolized the sexual fascination with the hybrid. White negroes, thought to be a Loangan marvel, were a magnet for Western attention along with the other hybrid creatures with which Loango abounded, and which were a constant source of fascination for Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Krünitz. Toward the end of the eighteenth century another hybrid was discovered in Loango, one which impact race discussions in the future.

Polygenists, Black Jews, and the Proofs for the Disunity of Man

Charles White set the scene for the insertion of Jews, blacks, and black Jews into the great origin debate from a polygenist perspective. The polygenist “American School” of race theorists tried to destroy the monogenist argument based on the existence of a color change among Jews by arguing that all black Jews were racially not Jews at all. The immutability of race became a key feature of polygenist thinking. One of the proofs for immutability was perceived in the images found in ancient Egyptian and Assyrian art. Nott’s Types of Mankind analyzed not only black but also Jewish racial specificity. The Jews had a mark on them, and blacks were marked by the “mark of Cain”—their color. The heresy of the black Jew was attacked time and again by the polygenists. Agassiz agreed that Jews and blacks were marked out and distinguished from other races. In France Joseph Arthur, “Comte” de Gobineau combatted the idea that black Jews proved the impact of climate on racial groups, and the single origin of humankind. Gradually the polygenist argument started to suggest that purity of race among Jews could be shown by the fact that all Jews were of a dark, dusky coloring. Beddoe developed an index of nigrescence, on which the Jews scored 100 percent. Russell, co-creator with Darwin of the concept of natural selection, took issue with the concept of multicolored Jews and so, more ambiguously, did Richard Burton. Burton thought that the Jews were racially unique, like blacks.

Blacks and Jews in the Western Imaginaire

Jews and Blacks considered outside the normal human framework. The color black had long had negative connotations.

“The Truth of the Origination of the World and Mankind”

The Judeo-Christian tradition maintains that humankind derives from the first couple in the Garden of Eden. St. Augustine even included the so-called monstrous races in the overall category of humanity. This consensus started to fragment in the sixteenth century with the work of Paracelsus and later Giordano Bruno, when alternative theories were put forward to account for human diversity. Their work was followed by others, including Julius Caesar Vanini, Isaac La Peyrère, John Atkins, Voltaire, François Bernier, Carl Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier, Edward Long, and Lord Kames. For most of them, the black and the Jew were the great obstacles to the unity of mankind.